Path traversal in Natural Language Toolkit - #VU141252
Published: August 7, 2026
Vulnerability identifier: #VU141252
CSH Severity: Medium
CVSS v4: 8.7 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: N/A
CWE-ID: CWE-22
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability:
No public exploit available
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to disclose sensitive information.
The vulnerability exists due to path traversal in nltk.data.load() and nltk.data.find() when processing user-supplied resource names containing percent-encoded traversal sequences. A remote attacker can supply a specially crafted resource name to disclose sensitive information.
This issue affects applications that pass user-controlled input to these functions, and percent-encoded sequences such as %2e%2e are decoded after path safety checks.
Affected software
Natural Language Toolkit
Remediation
Install security update from vendor's website.
Natural Language Toolkit - update to 3.10.0